During the past 10 years economy was growing and developing. Last major economic recession was witnessed in 2008. As of now, some experts, economists, and market players expect that the world economy might experience a downturn in 2020 or 2021.

There are some indirect signs, indicating that the probability of recession is now higher than it was during the previous years. These signs include ongoing trade war with China, behavior of stock market, lowering interest rates, certain decrease in production tempos, problems with getting student loans, etc. Recession, usually, results from collapse of some major collective belief or premise that turns out not to apply. So, in a year or two we might as well find out that economical system does not work as we expect it to, or that world trade connections are not as strong as they look.

Anyway, how can a company prepare for potential recession? Well, obviously, it has to try and increase its revenues. And reduce its costs. While in times of economical growth the natural thing to do is to increase sales, in times of recession it is the cost reduction and not the sales growth that has better chances of yielding tangible results. Cost reduction might help many businesses cut their expenses and, to some extent, increase their revenues.

3 steps towards transaction processing cost reduction

Reduce transaction processing costs

If companies manage to process transactions of their existing customers at lower cost, they might substantially benefit, because this will allow them to increase the profitability of future transactions (which will also cost less).

For example, if transaction processing cost is 0.5% lower, then the revenue is 0.5% higher, and, what’s more, all future operations are 0.5% more profitable.

One of the ways to get better processing deals is unification of all processing operations under one processing/gateway platform and, as a result, consolidation of transaction processing volumes. Based on consolidated processing volume, a company has better chances of negotiating lower rates from the acquirer/processor.

Speaking of processing cost reduction, we should also remember that they include not only the part of transaction amount that you pay to your processor. Indirect and opportunity costs, related to payment processing, although not always clearly visible and easily detectable, often amount to significant volumes as well. So, in addition to finding an optimal processing deal, company management should carefully check, whether any of indirect and opportunity costs can be reduced or avoided.

Automate the process

For example, if you manage to automate merchant on-boarding process, you can save on the wages of people who performed the respective manual work. The respective personnel can be re-directed to other tasks.

Other operations worth automating include reconciliation, settlement, reporting, accounting, and, potentially, management of chargebacks and refunds. If in your company any of these operations are still performed manually, now may be the right time to automate them.

Become more transparent

If your system is more resilient, stable, transparent, and user-friendly in the eyes of merchants, you can reduce the number of tech support calls. As a result, the total cost of servicing of customers through call centre (and of tech personnel work) will decrease.

All these steps might call for implementation of some new processing or gateway solution. This solution will be more universal, robust, feature-rich, and transparent than the current one. However, the process of switching to a new solution takes time. Adaptation to a new gateway technology, migration to a new platform, integrations, and certifications cannot be performed all at once. So, the transition should be planned in advance.

Conclusion

According to the experts, the next recession might strike in 2020 or 2021. So, those who are looking for ways to reduce their costs through implementation of a new gateway/processing platform have approximately a year to gradually switch to the new solution. This will make the transition smoother and offset the negative impact of potential economic downturn.

You are welcome to find more information on the subject in our transaction processing cost reduction guidelines.